Nearness

Nearness

new sound and performance works

with:

plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belesco Rogers):  Together/Apart

Kovács/O’Doherty:  1–100

doors: 19h;  start: 19h30

Nearness is an evening of new artworks by two Berlin-based artist duos — plan b (Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers) presenting ‘Together/Apart’, and Kovács/O’Doherty (Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty) presenting ‘1–100’. ‘Together/Apart’ is a performative lecture and live video work, and ‘1–100’ is a process-based spatialised sound work.

The works of both artist duos presented this evening share a common concern with the thematic core of nearness. Both works consider the possibilities of proximity and commonality — of matching without lining up, of the difference between the identical and the adjacent.

plan b:

The work presented by plan b — ‘Together/Apart’ — is based around the data that the duo have collected about their own lives and movements. The two artists both wear GPS tracking devices in their daily lives — a durational practice of ongoing self-surveillance, or ‘sousveillance’, that they have undertaken together for well over a decade. The archive of personal data that results from this practice has allowed the duo to extract information about their lives and movements, and using this information, they can precisely map their past location in time and space. As a result, they can also trace the times when they have been together and apart, and this is the starting-point for a work combining live video, text, and data, investigating the ghosts of past proximity and separation — of time and space shared, and unshared.

Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New (plan b) have been making a wide variety of work together since 2002. They have also recorded everywhere they go with a GPS since 2003 (Belasco) and 2007 (New), as well as every SMS text message that they have sent each other.

Kovács/O’Doherty:

In the work presented by Kovács/O’Doherty — ‘1–100’ — a hundred copies of the same seven-inch record are played, one after another. The sounds that result are also looped and layered by the two performers, as they move within the room. The actions undertaken iterate a repeating task: Each record is played, recorded, and looped in a precise score, integrating record, player, and speaker—object, movement, and sound. However, the specifics are decided in the moment, creating an aleatoric composition of fragments of familiar sound — excerpts that are similar yet different.

Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011. Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. This work often applies rigorous processes to simple but frequently-overlooked phenomena – they are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving.